Friday: Hili dialogue

Good morning on Friday, November 24, 2017, when most Americans are still on their Thanksgiving holiday. Sadly, it’s National Sardines Day, a comestible only slightly more palatable than the malodorous and despiséd anchovy. Much more exciting, it’s Evolution Day, for it was on November 24, 1859, that John Murray published Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Let’s see the full title (remember the kerfuffle when gleeful haters of Dawkins celebrated his inability to remember the full title?):

On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

There will be a quiz. Here’s the title page of the first edition. Only 1250 copies were printed, and if you want one it will run you over $125,000. (And why isn’t there a Darwin Google Doodle today?)

Other November 24 events are scanty. It was on that day in 1642 that Abel Tasman became the first European to find the island Van Diemen’s Land, later named Tasmania. On this day in 1963, two days after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy, Oswald was himself murdered by Jack Ruby. And on November 24, 1971, the famous hijacker “Dan Cooper” parachuted from a Northwest Orient plane over the state of Washington, carrying $200,000 in ransom money. Neither he nor the money was ever found, and it’s not clear if he survived the jump. Finally, and this is appropriate for Darwin Day, it was on November 24, 1974—115 years after The Origin was published—that Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, digging in Ethiopia, found a largely (40%) complete skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed “Lucy” after the Beatles song playing in camp.

Here she is in her museum drawer. Read more about her on Wikipedia, or in WEIT:

In Southern Calif, anchovies and sardines are the preferred bait fish for catching some really delicious ocean sport fish (calico and sand bass, yellowtail, tunas to name but a few). But eat the bait fish? Never. I’m with Jerry on that.

Sardines: I like them, too. They’re even on the menu @ Primanti’s (at the bottom of the list) and I ordered one once, curious to see how it would be. The waitress said, “Huh, someone ordered one of those last month.”

Orchids: Here’s a song for Hili (Carl Smith was June Carter Cash’s first husband).

In the 1990s, he either became or admitted to being skeptical of evolution. There’s a 2 hour Firing Line debate about it somewhere online with 8 panelists, including Ken Miller and Michael Ruse on the evolution side.